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Page 1: OIR SAVVY SEARCHING Google Scholar revisitedtefkos.comminfo.rutgers.edu/Courses/e530/Readings/Jaszo Google... · SAVVY SEARCHING Google Scholar revisited Pe´ter Jacso´ University

SAVVY SEARCHING

Google Scholar revisitedPeter Jacso

University of Hawaii, Hawaii, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to revisit Google Scholar.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of GoogleScholar.

Findings – The Google Books project has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich anddiverse content of Google Scholar. The downside of the growth is that significant gaps remain for topranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for thesame source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased.

Originality/value – This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.

Keywords Data collection, Worldwide web, Document delivery

Paper type General review

Google Scholar had its debut in November 2004. Although it is still in beta version, it isworthwhile to revisit its pros and cons, as changes have taken place in the past threeyears both in the content and the software of Google Scholar – for better or worse.

Its content has grown significantly - courtesy of more academic publishers anddatabase hosts opening their digital vaults to allow the crawlers of Google Scholar tocollect data from and index the full-text of millions of articles from academic journalcollections and scholarly repositories of preprints and reprints. The Google Booksproject also has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diversecontent of Google Scholar. The downside of the growth is that significant gapsremained for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicateand quadruplicate records for the same source documents (which Google Scholarcannot detect reliably) has increased.

While the regular Google service does an impressive job with mostly unstructuredweb pages, the software of Google Scholar keeps doing a very poor job with the highlystructured and tagged scholarly documents. It still has serious deficiencies with basicsearch operations, does not have any sort options (beyond the questionable relevanceranking). It offers filtering features by data elements, which are present only in a verysmall fraction of the records (such as broad subject categories) and/or are often absentand incorrect in Google Scholar even if they are present correctly in the source items.

These include nonexistent author names, which turn out to be section names,subtitles, or any part of the text, including menu option text which has nothing to dowith the document or its author. This makes “F. Password” not only the mostproductive, but also a very highly cited author. Page numbers, the first or secondsegment of an ISSN, or any other four-digit numbers are often interpreted by GoogleScholar as publication years due to “artificial unintelligence”. As a consequence,Google Scholar has a disappointing performance in matching citing and cited items; itshit counts and citation counts remain highly inflated, defying the most basic

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm

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Online Information ReviewVol. 32 No. 1, 2008pp. 102-114q Emerald Group Publishing Limited1468-4527DOI 10.1108/14684520810866010

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plausibility concepts when reporting about documents from the 1990s citing papers tobe published in 2008, 2009 or even later in the twenty-first century.

In spite of the deficiencies and shoddiness of its software the free Google Scholarservice is of great help in the resource discovery process and can often lead users to theprimary documents in their library in print or digital format and/or to open accessversions of papers which otherwise would cost more than $30-$40 each throughdocument delivery services. Google Scholar can act at the minimum as a free, huge anddiverse multidisciplinary I/A database or a federated search engine with limitedsoftware capabilities, but with the superb bonus of searching incredibly rapidly thefull-text of several million source documents. However, using it for bibliometric andscientometric evaluation, comparison and ranking purposes can produce veryunscholarly measures and indicators of scholarly productivity and impact.

Background and literatureOn the third anniversary of Google Scholar I give a summary of the pros and cons ofGoogle Scholar, focusing on the increasingly valuable content and on the decreasinglysatisfactory software features which must befuddle searchers and ought to beaddressed by the developers. I discuss here Google Scholar from the perspective ofsome of the traditional database evaluation criteria that have been used for decades(Jacso, 1998). I complement this paper with an unusually long bibliography of some ofthe most relevant English-language articles by competent information professionals.For many of the citations I provide the URL of an open access preprint or reprintversion, or of the original version published in an open access journal, to offer readersconvenient access to the papers and understand the opinion of the authors. Re-readingthese papers in preparation for this review was a great pleasure, even when my opiniondid not agree with that of the reviewers. The balance of pro and con arguments andevidentiary materials presented by competent information professionals has beenrewarding and has motivated my creation of this bibliography. It does not includereferences to papers which are dedicated to the citation counts of articles as presentedby Google Scholar. These will be provided in follow-up papers which discuss thestrengths and weaknesses of using Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar todetermine the Hirsch-index and derivative indexes for measuring and comparingresearch output quantitatively.

After the launch of Google Scholar it received much attention, just as anything doesthat relates to Google, Inc. Within the first few months of its debut, there were anumber of reviews in open access web columns (Price, 2004; Jacso, 2004; Goodman,2004; Gardner and Eng, 2005; Abram, 2005; Tenopir, 2005), and three web blogs werelaunched dedicated to Google Scholar (Sondemann, 2005; Giustini, 2005), or partiallydedicated (Iselid, 2006).

These were followed by reviews in traditional publications (Jacso, 2005a; Myhill,2005; Notess, 2005, O’Leary, 2005, Giustini and Barsky, 2005; Noruzi, 2005; Adlingtonand Benda, 2006; Cathcart and Roberts, 2006) focussing on the content and softwareaspects of Google Scholar. These were well complemented by a number of essays,editorials and surveys pondering the acceptance, use, promotion and “domestication”of Google Scholar as one of the endorsed research tools for students and faculty inacademic institutions (Kesselman and Watsen, 2005; Price, 2005; Anderson, 2006;

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Gorman, 2006; Mullen and Hartman, 2006; Friend, 2006; Hamaker and Spry, 2006;York, 2006; Helms-Park et al., 2007; Schmidt, 2007; Taylor, 2007).

As Google Scholar became more intensively used, several research papers started toput it into context by comparing Google Scholar’s performance with a single database(Schultz, 2007), federated search engines (Felter, 2005; Giustini and Barsky, 2005; Chen,2006; Sadeh, 2006; Donlan and Cooke, 2006; Haya et al., 2007; Herrera, 2007),citation-enhanced databases such as Web of Science and/or Scopus (Bauer andBakkalbasi, 2005; Jacso, 2005b; Jacso, 2005c; Yang and Meho, 2006; Norris andOppenheim, 2007), or with a mix of these and traditional scholarlyindexing/abstracting databases (White, 2006).

There is increasing specialisation in researching Google Scholar, applying thetraditional database evaluation criteria such as size, timeliness, source type andespecially breadth of journal coverage (Jacso, 1997) in a consistent manner in thecontext of a very non-traditional database which piggybacks on other sources ratherthan creating its own (Wleklinksi, 2005; Vine, 2005; Vine, 2006; Neuhaus et al., 2006;Pomerantz, 2006; White, 2006; Mayr and Walter, 2007; Walters, 2007).

The recent incorporation of books in Google Scholar from Google Book Search(which after a poor debut with deficient software features, turned around andintroduced within a month far more sophisticated software than Google Scholar inthree years), spawned useful research (Hauer, 2006; Lackie, 2006; Goldeman andConnolly, 2007), as did the only good new software feature of Google Scholar which ledusers to the full-text digital source document in the users’ library through Open-URLresolvers (Grogg and Ferguson, 2005; O’Hara, 2007; Lagace and Chisman, 2007).

There is one additional research area where Google Scholar will play an importantrole: its use for bibliometric and scientometric evaluation of the performance ofresearchers, which is such a complex issue that it deserves to be discussed in a separatepaper, with its own rich set of references.

The prosMost of the pros relate to the content part of Google Scholar, from different angles,including coverage, variety in source and journal base, size and currency.

Journal coverageThe source base of Google Scholar has been considerably enhanced since its debut, asevery scholarly publisher wants to be a part of the Google universe. The source basealso increased in quality through full-text indexing of thousands of additionalacademic journals of importance from the sites of the publishers, rather than justindexing bibliographic data and abstract from I/A databases. The two most importantjournal publishers that started to co-operate with Google Scholar are Elsevier and theAmerican Chemical Society. Although only a tiny proportion of these publishers’digital collections (Elsevier’s 7 million items and the ACS’s 0.75 million items) havebeen indexed so far by Google Scholar, their shares are expected to increase rapidlyonce the Google Scholar spiders are sent to their routes.

Book coverageIt was an excellent idea to add book records to Google Scholar, primarily from theGoogle Books Project. It is a huge advantage, as books are barely present even as an

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indexing/abstracting record, let alone as a completely indexed, full-text item (forsearching, not viewing) in most of the other multidisciplinary mega-databases (exceptfor the also free and outstanding Amazon.com site). In preparing for a tutorial sessionin Vietnam, it was impressive to find 27 books in Google Scholar, each of which hadnumerous passages about or references to the so-called “scholar gentry class”. This isthe type of casual digital book use that the late Frederick Kilgour, the founder of OCLCenvisioned more than 20 years ago, when he was already in his early 70s.

Geographic and language coverageThe geographic and language coverage of Google Scholar is also impressive andgenuine. It is a typical limitation of even the subscription-based scholarly databasesthat they often almost exclusively cover only anglophone sources, predominantlypublished in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada (in which case francophonedocuments are also covered). I do not blame the commercial database publishers forthis, as they were not created on the same principles as the UN or UNESCO. They haveto spend their money on processing documents which are of interest to andunderstandable by the majority of scholars, their primary customers.

The Google Scholar service does not have the ever-increasing costs of subscriptionand human processing of the scholarly print publications. It has free access topractically any scholarly digital document collection it wants, and wisely has decidedto index (by software) important Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese,Korean and Russian language collections of academic works. While the latter four areof no help to me, the former three are and are worth the extra mental effort to read inthe native language, as there are several sources in my areas of specialisation whereresearchers in Germany, Austria, the Iberian peninsula, Central and South America(especially Brazil), that publish only in German, Spanish and Portuguese.

I have avoided referring to the actual size of Google Scholar and its subsets, as it isimpossible to determine a realistic number, or even estimate the number of records inthe database, or in the Canadian subset or the language subsets.

Digital repositoriesThe coverage of digital repositories – even if far from complete – is already a greatasset, especially for physics, astrophysics, medicine, economics and computer andinformation sciences and technology. But the use of such full-text repositories stillcould be significantly improved. For example, only about a quarter of the open accessPubMed Central (PMC) items are directly available in Google Scholar. True, there arerecords in Google Scholar – from other sources, such as cababstractsplus.org – formany more of the 620,000 full text documents deposited in PMC.

It would, however, be essential to index the source documents and give thempriority in displaying the result list clearly, marking them as open access, instead ofgiving undeserved prominence to the British Library document delivery service (BLDirect), which is more than happy to charge for document delivery even when the openaccess paper is just a click away from the user. Just as quickly as Google Scholar candetermine whether a journal is available for article delivery through the BritishLibrary, it could determine whether it is available free of charge from runs of openaccess issues of the journal. The same is true for the open access full-text subset of theNational Transportation Library (which has, for example, more than 100 documents

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about transport-related terrorism). In sharp contrast Google Scholar has only a dozensource documents indexed and made available from that site.

While praising the broad content coverage of Google Scholar, it must be noted thatthere are still huge gaps in the full-text indexing of the most important serialpublications as mentioned in the original review (Jacso, 2005a). For example, less than17 per cent of the 430,500 documents at the nature.com web site were indexed byGoogle Scholar directly from that site (which includes not only Nature magazine butalso many other journals of the Nature Publishing Group). True, many more than 17per cent of them have a record in Google Scholar, but many of these are just citationrecords with minimal information.

Indexing/abstracting recordsIt is good that there are millions of records from good indexing/abstracting databasesfor documents for which digital full text is not yet available. However, Google Scholarshould have used the unique privilege granted by thousands of scholarly publishers ofgaining permission to crawl and index the full text of the primary documents, ratherthan just the ersatz records, often redundantly through several indexing/abstractingdatabases.

SizeI usually start the content review by determining the size of the database, and itsdistinct subsets. It is essential for researchers to know how many records are in GoogleScholar in total, and/or in, say, English or Spanish, which journals are covered fromwhat publishers for what time span, but its developers “take the Fifth” when askedabout it or about any factual features of the database (such as the number of journals,publishers, foreign language materials, articles, conference papers, reports, bookscovered). My various “sizing up” queries do not work so it would be irresponsible toreport them.

The only good new features in the software are the Library Links and LibrarySearch options. These inform users whether their library offers access to the documentin question. If your library signed up (and provided data about its digital journalholdings) to Google Scholar this would work automatically (if Google Scholar isinvoked from the library or a computer with authenticated IP address, or remotelythrough the library, after the appropriate login process). The Library Search option forbooks works if the library is an OCLC member. It is to be noted that the [BOOK] label inthe Google Scholar result lists often refers to a review of, or blurb about, the bookrather than the book itself.

The consPractically all the major negative traits of Google Scholar are caused by or relate tosoftware issues. As indicated above, it is impossible even to guess the size of thedatabase because of elementary problems with the software.

InnumeracyIt speaks volumes about the limitations of the software that when using the query term, the . (the most commonly occurring English word), Google Scholar yields a hitcount of over 1.5 billion records, whether you are using it with or without the þ sign or

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surround it by double quotation marks (as it is supposed to be a stop word withoutthese signs, but apparently it is not). I do not believe this hit count to be true, but that isnot the point here (see Figure 1).

If you add (out of curiosity) the letter “a” in an OR relationship, the result set shouldincrease by picking up records for foreign language source documents which use theletter a as the definite article and/or a preposition. In the extreme case, if all anglophonerecords had the letter “a” as the indefinite article or part of terms such a “blood type A”,“personality A”, “grade A”, the number of hits would not increase.

But in Google Scholar the OR operator decreases the result set to less than 1 per centof the original set. The regular Google search engine does not take part in thisnonsense. Some may feel lucky that, although both search terms were purportedlyexcluded from the search (as the message shows), Google Scholar still could providewith nearly 14 million hits – without using the þ sign or the double quotation mark.Actually, it shows only 1,000 hits at most for any query, so it can claim any numberabove 1,000 without the burden of proof (see Figure 2).

This has been a problem from the beginning. The enhancement of the content hasnot been matched by improvements in the software. The software does not reflect atall, for example, the specialties of the fully-indexed books. The template in theadvanced mode still refers to articles written by, articles published in, articlespublished between, and articles in subject areas.

As for subject areas, they should not be used as filters. When entering the search forany documents with the word “Vietnam” in the title, and the radio button for all subjectareas turned on, Google Scholar reports 135,000 hits, an impressively high number.When sending the query through the advanced template, Google Scholar inserts twospaces in front of the search term. If you change it to one, the result will go up to137,000; if you eliminate both spaces the result set will revert to 135,000 items. This isnot true for field-specific searches, such as author, title, journal name. This will be the

Figure 1.Hit count for the definite

English article

Figure 2.Unorthodox Boolean OR

which reduces the originalset by 99 per cent

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least enigmatic part of the search process, thanks to the logic of Google Scholar (seeFigure 3).

Selecting one checkbox at a time for filtering by the first subject group, then thesecond, the third, etc. will produce cumulative subsets. After the last subject group theaggregate of the seven subject categories will produce a set of 20,500 records. This isless than 15 per cent of the original set, meaning that 85 per cent of the items for thistopic are not assigned to any of the subject groups (see Figure 4).

Much more surprisingly, when the query is expanded by adding the word“Vietnamese” to the query without any filtering, the result will shrink to 46,100 items(34 per cent of the single-word query) (see Figure 5).

More oddly, restricting the search to the seven listed subject groups will increase theresult set to 105,000. Activating the “Search in All Subject Areas” radio button willreport a set size of 43,200 (not shown here because any logic breaks down here, andonly the first 1,000 items will be listed by Google Scholar anyhow) (see Figure 6).

Figure 3.Search for Vietnam in thetitle in all subject areas

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The publication year limiters behave in an equally odd way. Limiting the initial setwith “Vietnam” in the title to the publication year range 1435-2008, to accommodate thefirst possible English language transliteration of the Vietnamese word for the name ofthe country to publications which will be published the next year (I write this inmid-November, 2007) yields 20,200 hits. Limiting the search to 1960-2008, i.e. to a morethan 500 years shorter time span, increases the set to 20,600 items. The fact that many

Figure 4.Selecting each listed

categories the setdecreases by 85 percent

Figure 5.Expanding the query will

drastically shrink theresult set

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records in any sample would not have the publication year data element, or GoogleScholar would not recognise it, does not justify this logic. There is no word about thisserious limitation in the help file (see Figure 7).

IlliteracyThese were problems of innumeracy, but there are many problems that can beclassified as problems of illiteracy in the software. When the two come together incertain searches the result becomes serious. Google Scholar has deficiencies indistinguishing author names from other parts of the text using its parsing algorithm.

After seeing left and right author names like F. Password, V. Findings, N. Vietnam, S.Vietnam, it was surprising to notice one of the new software features of Google Scholar,the cluster of authors related to the user’s query as explained in the help file. My testsearch shows the suggested authors from a set of purportedly 2,9110,000 records on thetopic of risk factor evaluation with the following names: P Population, R Evaluation, MData, R Findings and M Results (see Figure 8).

The extent of wrong author names is well above hundreds of thousands and oftenthese results deprive the real authors from receiving credit for some of their paper(including highly cited papers) and thus prevent them from receiving a decent h-index.

The upcoming issues will look at the theory and the practice of determining theh-index in general, and in Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science in particular.

Figure 6.Restricting the query topredefined subjectcategories will more thandouble the set

Figure 7.The shorter the time spanthe higher the hit count

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Figure 8.Odd list of recommended

authors in the side bar,and a cheery help file

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Taylor, S. (2007), “Google scholar – friend or foe?”, Interlending and Document Supply, Vol. 35No. 1, pp. 4-6.

Tenopir, C. (2005) Vol. 32, “Google in the academic library: undergraduates may find all theywant on Google Scholar”, Library Journal, 1 February, p. 32, available at: www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA498868.html

Vine, R. (2005), “Google Scholar is a full year late indexing Pubmed content SiteLines”, availableat: www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_02.html#000282

Vine, R. (2006), “Google Scholar”, Journal of Medical Library Association, Vol. 94 No. 1, pp. 97-9,available at: www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid¼ 1324783

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Walters, W.H. (2007), “Google Scholar coverage of a multidisciplinary field”, InformationProcessing and Management, Vol. 43 No. 4, pp. 1121-32.

White, B. (2006), “Examining the claims of Google Scholar as a serious information source”,New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 11-24,available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/7657

Wleklinski, J.M. (2005), “Studying Google Scholar: wall to wall coverage?”, Online, Vol. 29 No. 3,pp. 22-6.

Yang, K. and Meho, L.I. (2006), ”Citation analysis: a comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, andWeb of Science”, Proceedings of the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society forInformation Science and Technology (ASIST), Vol. 43, available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00008121/01/Yang_citation.pdf

York, M.C. (2006), “Calling the scholars home: Google Scholar as a tool for rediscovering theacademic library”, Internet Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 10 Nos 3/4, pp. 117-33.

Further reading

Callicott, B. and Vaughn, D. (2006), “Google Scholar vs. library scholar: testing the performanceof Schoogle”, Internet Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 10 Nos 3-4, pp. 71-88.

Norris, B.P. (2006), “Google: its impact on the library”, Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 23 No. 9,pp. 9-11.

Robinson, M.L. and Wusteman, J. (2007), “Putting Google Scholar to the test: a preliminarystudy”, Program, Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 71-80.

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